Category Archives: Backgrounders and Toolkits

For literally decades, Media Alliance has been publishing a community-oriented list of journalists to aid advocates, local groups and researchers in getting alternative information and perspectives out to the media. Originally under the name People Behind The News and then the Northern California Press List. Always at a fraction of the price of the professional PR companies.

But in 2019, it’s becoming clear that journalists are more and more reluctant to throw the communications door wide open. Dangerous trolls, literal shootings at newspaper offices, doxxings and verbal abuse; it has all taken a toll. So when we say to the press that we want to make your personal contact info available so the non-professionals can reach you more easily, a lot of journalists say no thanks.

We get it. The safety of journalists is important to us. But so is the ability of underrepresented voices, untold stories, and alternative points of view to get in front of the mainstream media.

So we’re taking a new approach for 2019. A community-based press release service.

For what we hope is a modest price (and as usual, if you call or email and plead poverty, we’re probably a soft touch for a noble cause), we’ll take your information and polished or unpolished press release and distribute it for you and hopefully start getting you the media coverage you deserve.

Here is how it works:

A) Send us an image and your draft press release, including a media contact for follow-up inquiries, and all the who, what, where, when and why information, and we’ll give it a once-over and send it out to 800 Northern California journalists.

$150

B) Send us an image and some basic information and we’ll craft your press release including finding the news hook and the telling quote, format it, and send it out to 800 Northern California journalists.

$275

Book a series package of 3 releases whenever you need them and get 20% off on each one. Good for two years from the date of purchase.

The pace of protest in Trump’s America is a bad case of whiplash. Activism-fatigue is all too real. Many of us don’t want to keep up with the latest happenings because we can’t get through a news feed without finding something we need to to try to stop.

When you have too, but you just can’t; we’re introducing a service just for these special times to produce hyper-speed activism websites in just a few days with the basic components: sign up forms, petitions, targeted action alerts, SSL certificates, and social media tie-ins.

This frees up activists and organizers to go out and talk to people instead of huddling up in front of computers, while making a campaign digitally viable in real time.

Websites with the basic components and up to 8 pages of background material including sign-up forms, event calender, one petition and/or targeted action alert, in https protocol, and linked to up to 5 social media accounts can be live as quickly as within 72 hours of request.

$1,500 for site generation + domain/server/SSL fees at cost.

Because Media Alliance is a mission-based organization, this service is only available for campaigns and efforts that are congruent with our organizational goals and values.

The famously liberal East Bay city of Berkeley has been engaged in a lengthy dispute about the release of a Center for Policing Equity analysis of police stop data that indicated significant racial profiling.

The decision to release the report went all the way to the City Council which overrode the Chief of Police to make the report public.

Here it is. The report is preceded by a memo from the Berkeley Police Chief explaining his thoughts and concerns about the draft report.

It is probably fair to say that most, if not all, municipal police departments would yield similar or worse results when stop data is analyzed. It is to Berkeley’s credit that they proceeded with the report. Now the question is what will be done as a result.

Report from MuckRack tracks and analyzes media hits for nonprofit organizations using a 50-org sample. This year’s report focuses on the question: “how can we measure and grow the real-world impact of a story once its out there?”

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Webinar: How To Stop The Lies and Hate on Facebook – June 10

The web we are caught in is fed by viral disinformation. Nowhere is this more acute than on the world’s biggest social media platform, Facebook. Sure you can #DeleteFacebook, but you can’t delete the impact it has on the world around you.

We’re pleased to host this conversation at 11am on June 10th, with Jeff Chester, ED of the Center for Digital Democracy, Carmen Scurato, Senior Policy Counsel at Free Press and the Change The Terms Coalition, Fadi Quran, Campaigns Director at Avaaz, and the #ProtestFacebook coalition.